About the Artist
Mona Lisa Banzon Aspiras is of Philippine origin and was born and raised in Rome, Italy. She is multilingual (English mother tongue, fluent Italian and French, and basic Spanish and Filipino) and multicultural. She has been blessed to have attended international schools in Rome for both elementary and high school, and therefore exposed to a wide variety of races and cultures growing up.
Mona Lisa’s art education is a mixture of self-taught and semi-formal study. Mr. Dennis Cigler, a retired I.B. (International Baccalaureate) Examiner and Art Professor from her high school in Rome, Italy, and a prolific and accomplished artist, taught various art concepts and techniques such as form, perspective, color theory, line, silkscreening, sculpting, pattern making, and more. She then progressed to taking private courses with an established painter, Ms. Francesca di Stefano, a successful Italian watercolorist in the Realist style. Professors Avanessian, Ballestrelli, and Berdini, who were her former teachers at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma (Academy of Fine Arts of Rome where she earned a Fine Arts certificate in 1995), taught her Figure Drawing, Etching, and Engraving. At the same time in 1995, she experimented with watercolor, acrylic, and pastel painting and drawing, by learning through self-study.
Mona Lisa then transferred to Virginia, USA where she took several art electives such as Visual Arts Foundations, Drawing I and II, Watercolor I and II, Three-Dimensional Design, and Computer Graphics at Virginia Wesleyan College and Tidewater Community College, while finishing her Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology, Associate’s degree in IT, and diploma in Computer Programming. In 2009, she started studying with an independent American artist and renewed her studies in Drawing and Watercolor.
Mona Lisa paints primarily in watercolor, gouache/tempera, and acrylic; however, other mediums she favors are markers (regular and wwtercolor), chalk pastels, oil pastels, ink, graphite, and lately, digital art. Her style is mostly figurative, impressionist, expressionist, and abstract, with subject matter ranging from landscapes and seascapes, to still life, portraits, nature, and religious themes.
She greatly enjoys drawing and keeping sketchbooks, and loves creating art “en plein air,” or creating on location. People, animals, and nature are her favorite subjects for sketching on the spot, as well as architecture, and everyday objects/still life. She would like to experiment more with abstract painting, in particular with the use of shapes and symbols.
Currently Mona Lisa also creates digital painting/computer art, and multimedia artwork combining art and music/spoken word in video form. While studying for her Associate’s degree in IT: Internet Specialist, she learned how to use graphic design softwares such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, which would prove to be invaluable for her job as a Design Assistant for a home textiles company.
Her present goals are, besides perfecting her drawing skills, to explore other non-digital art techniques such as multimedia in traditional painting, and mediums such as decoupage, mosaics, and more.
In Rome, Mona Lisa exhibited her art with her mother, an accomplished artist long-time versed in several media, at the FAO/UN (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), in 1995. During the late 1990’s to late 2000’s in Virginia, her art was exhibited in occasion of such events as the Philippine Centennial and Philippine Independence Day at the Chrysler Museum of Art, Harrison Opera House, MacArthur Museum, and Filipino-American Student Cultural Center of Old Dominion University in Norfolk. As a past member of regional art associations such as the Chesapeake Bay Art Association (CBAA), Tidewater Art Alliance (TAA), and Chesapeake Bay Watercolorist Society (CBWS), she participated in the juried TAA exhibit, “Spring Fling” at Studio 107, and a CBAA Spring Members’ Show at Tidewater Community College’s Roper Fine Arts Center, both in Norfolk; a TAA Members’ Show at the Barry Robinson Fine Arts Center, a CBWS Members’ Show at the Attys. Huff, Poole & Mahoney office building in Virginia Beach, as well as other exhibits in Virginia Beach; and a CBAA Members’ Show in Suffolk. Lately, in 2020, she participated in the online international juried art competitions “Engage Art” and the “Luxembourg Art Prize.”
Besides creating visual art, Mona Lisa is interested in other art forms such as creative writing (eg. poetry, short stories, quotes and aphorisms), photography, and composing music. She also enjoys baking and cooking, reading nonfiction on spirituality, religion, and art, spontaneous road trips, traveling, city life as well as the countryside, and bird and people watching. She is what she like to call herself, “an eternal student and dreamer” who “tries to keep herself a mystery to herself, so she can maintain the feeling of wonder, not only for her own being but for the world in general and other people.”
Mona Lisa‘s Amazon author page can be found at https://www.amazon.com/author/monalisabanzonaspiras, while her books on Blurb.com are available at https://www.blurb.com/user/joconda.
— All Artwork, Photos, and Text, Copyright © 2019-2024 Mona Lisa Banzon Aspiras, except for music and sound effects in Multimedia and Digital Art: Procreate pages.
— Digital Artwork and Multimedia done with Procreate, Adobe Fresco (formerly Adobe Sketch/Draw), Infinite Painter, Tayasui Sketches, Sony Sketch, PicsArt ColorPaint, Joy Doodle/Paint Joy, iMovie, Adobe Premiere Rush, Adobe Spark, VideoMusic and FlipaClip.
Mona Lisa’s Space 